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DMI News |
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January 04, 2009 18:43 In the interest of promoting my renewed spirit (for as long as it lasts anyway), I'm going to lay out some of the projects I hope to accomplish this week. No guarantee I'll accomplish them all... or.. ahem .. any of them.. But here's to hoping anyway. First off, completely unrelated to the site, but entirely related to my comfort and that of the resident beautiful girls.. I need to patch up some of the gaping holes that let wind get under the house. Ultimately I'll need to insulate completely under there, but can't really do that until I'm completely finished with the house. For the time being however, just making sure I dont' get a good 30 mph crosswind under the house will help significantly. I need to reimplement the projects page, spamproof and enforce account registration to use it. It might help me with keeping on top of the many projects I'm constantly trying to work on if I have a convienent place to check. I just took it off the page when it was getting spammed constantly. I'll probably wipe it clean and start it over from scratch. Music control needs administrative control to let me disable changing of songs when I actually want to listen to something, while still letting people view the current playlist. Critter control needs more administrative control too. I'll implement queuejumping and owner overrides of the locking. Too many times I want to make a quick adjustment to someone who's trying for the 30th time to drive past a corner and not quite making it. Right now, that requires me to get up and move it. Laziness demands a better option. Going through some of my dad's stuff I found a PIC programmer, and at least one PIC. I need to get that assembled and start playing with it. I have schematics to create a servo controller using a PIC. Having control of a servo will allow me to add a panning sonar to the critter and start the process of mapping the environment. Still going to need to do something about encoders, but one crisis at a time. I've also found a schematic for a PWM to voltage converter. The TS7200 on the critter has an ADC and one of the other sonars I have puts out a PWM signal, so I'll be able to read that one as well.. .maybe as a rearview sensor to avoid running into things while backing up. Also found some tapeswitches that need investigating to use as a bump sensor that can completely surround the critter. Ok, yeah, I'm rambling, but most of what I need to do here is R&D. That way the next time I make a trip to tanners I'll have a list of components to purchase. I need to get a server working that has a functional soundcard. I currently only have one, and that's the video server, and it needs its sound output for the TV channel. Nova used to be the voice of Jeeves but the onboard sound device quit working. I used a usb sound device for a while, but it has quit working as well. Tried to purchase a soundcard and stick it in there, but neither the new card nor another one I managed to find will work. I'm considering moving nova to a new machine, maybe upgrading it in the process. I have an old windows box, which incidently is a more recent CPU with more ram, that I uprgraded from last year and it's currently sitting in a closet. I could get a fresh version of fedora, and move over the drives. Nova used to handle all of the cams in the house, but since I switched my main cam to an IP cam and I'm not using any of the analog cams anymore, I don't really need it in its current configuration anymore. The only thing it currently does is run lampmaster (which any server with a serial port can do) and some file storage, which is also not a problem migrating to a new(er) machine. In any event, this will solve my soundcard issue, which is the ultimate goal anyway. Ok, that should do it for the week. I'm off to work now.
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